What’s been revealed about Dr Peter Higgs, longtime curator of Greek antiquities at the British Museum, while eye-poppingly brazen, shouldn’t, for those in the museum world, come as anything of a surprise.
For those few of my gentle readers, and I know there are very few of you, who are unaware of this, most accredited museums of even the humblest stripe invariably have more objects given to their care than are ever at any one point out on display. Witness those items allegedly stolen by Peter Higgs, valuable though they might have been, they were, none of them, ever displayed and kept by the museum for study purposes, presumably handled by a very few scholars for purposes of academic research.
Or maybe not.
For most museums, their so-called back room contains a welter of objects, as my farmer father would have said, not good enough to keep but too good to throw away. When items are accepted into a museum’s permanent collection, it is very often at the whim of one or two people who may, or may not, accord with a museum’s accession policy. This further assumes such a policy exists, and often it does not. Further, a less than desirable gift might accompany something highly desirable and it is a rare donor that allows the museum to cherry pick- one must take either all or none, and the taking of the none might prove opprobrious to a donor otherwise highly esteemed by the museum.
So the institution is between a rock and a hard spot, and in consequence, is in possession of very many more items that are of mediocre quality and do not therefore articulate with those a curator might deem worthy of public presentation. Mind, everything taken into the permanent collection of an accredited museum requires the preparation of a curatorial dossier, an accession file that documents at a minimum a description of the object, notes on its condition, details of how it was acquired, and, importantly, good photographic images. And, of course, an inventory number is assigned.
Simple enough, yes? The problem is, certainly in the case of the British Museum, very many objects were acquired literally centuries ago, and some rudimentary curatorial dossier might have been prepared, but, no surprise, itself not looked at by anyone in decades. As in the case of the light-fingered Dr Higgs, save the sharp eye of a nameless researcher who saw one of the objects offered on eBay, no one might ever have known the object had been filched.
One has to note that very many of the most prestigious museums are in locations where the cost of living is, by most measures, prohibitive. I think of one long tenured senior curator of my acquaintance in London, who, until recently, lived in a small basement flat in Hackney. But even that, with Hackney up and coming, proved too expensive but the death of a near relative resulted in a legacy, and, with much of the salt removed from his tears of mourning, allowed him to stay put. I am hardly an apologist for the sticky fingers of museum personnel, but the financial exigencies of living in London, or Paris, or New York make the prospect of relieving their museum employer of a few unappreciated items more than a bit tempting.